The multiverse is upon us. Sci-fi and superhero franchises such as Star Trek and The Avengers have made the notion of multiple or alternative dimensions in time and space a commonplace. (Witness the forthcoming Marvel film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.) As Christopher White shows in his new book, Other Worlds, in addition to shaping popular culture, modern scientific and mathematical ideas of alternative, higher dimensions have played an increasing role in theological reflection and religious imagination since the late nineteenth century.
White tracks the appearance of modern appeals to “higher, invisible dimensions” to the Victorian “crisis of faith.” His book opens with a discussion of the lives and legacies of two early apostles of the fourth dimension: Edwin A. Abbott and C. Howard Hinton. Abbott's novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Seeley, 1884) described the journey of “Square,” a character in a two-dimensional universe whose world is turned upside down by his experiences of a higher (i.e., third) dimension. The story proved immensely influential among writers, artists, social reformers, and intellectuals. A mathematician and science-fiction writer, Hinton went beyond the allegories of Abbott, developing a set of visualization exercises based on a tesseract (a four-dimensional cube) that promised to deliver spiritual knowledge, supernatural powers, and profound feelings of peace. White identifies three categories of people attracted to ideas of a fourth dimension: “Liberal Christians who reimagined the Resurrection and Christ's miracles in fourth-dimensional terms, . . . mystics and radicals . . . [who] saw in them seeds of a new metaphysical worldview or social order. And . . . still others who treated Hinton's cubes as objects of spiritual power, as tools that bestowed visionary capacities when used in private mediations, public meetings, or séances” (69).
In this way, the true subject of Other Worlds is the afterlife of mysticism in the modern West and the ancient Christian tradition of the spiritual senses—modes of disciplined perception trained on higher spiritual realities invisible to the naked eye. Like the practices of mesmerists, Spiritualist mediums, and Theosophists, fourth-dimension approaches promised to connect material and spiritual realities without entirely collapsing or dissolving one into the other. As White writes, talk of “higher dimensions” offered “new ways of thinking about transcendence, new methods of cultivating spiritual practices, and new traditions that might replace older religious ones that now seemed unpalatable” (69). Science was enlisted to recalibrate (rather than reject) traditional religious ideas of “heaven” and “spirit,” couching the supernatural within the natural as a continuous extension of conventional reality, while at the same time preserving a sense of rupture with everyday experience.
Over nine beautifully written and richly researched chapters, White documents the staggering variety of characters who found currency in the fourth-dimension concept—early theorists of religion such as William James, professed atheists such as Bertrand Russell, and Christian apologists such as C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle. Despite sharing a common core of principles, the fourth-dimension concept attracted folks of different stripes for different reasons. White argues that philosophically oriented mathematicians such as Cassius J. Keyser, attracted to the parallels between math and theology, saw the fourth dimension as a way “to inculcate enchantment, awe, and wonder,” mitigating the tragic loss of imaginative vision associated with the rise of materialist models of science (67). Artists and writers found the concept emotionally or intellectually liberating in its suggestive appeal to the superiority of intuition and imagination, a bulwark of color and depth against the reductive scope of pure reason. For social reformers, contact with higher planes was closely allied with the expansion of human freedom, consciousness, and social progress. The fourth dimension challenged sexist social norms and offered W. E. B. Dubois a way of thinking about African American experience as fuller and more encompassing (extra-dimensional) than the constrictive perspectives available to white Americans. White presents an ongoing tension between those who saw themselves as scientific investigators engaged in the discovery of previously unexplored planes of existence and those who delighted in the “creation” of imaginary hyperspaces as acts of human invention.
Despite its attention to practices, Other Worlds should be seen primarily as a contribution to intellectual history. It offers a helpful corrective to much recent scholarship on modern spirituality, which has tended to focus on issues of orthopraxy, while paying less attention to the ideas or beliefs that undergird these variegated systems of practice. White brilliantly demonstrates how “people with widely diverging temperaments and interests, with secular and spiritual commitments, with elite and popular sensibilities, strategically borrowed mathematical and scientific concepts to recover hope in a supernatural beyond” (13). He excels at simplifying complex mathematical and scientific ideas for those who (like the reviewer) lack specialized training in those fields. Further, by showing how fourth-dimensional ideas have been used “not to attack spiritual beliefs but to buttress them in unexpected ways,” White takes another chip at the punching-bag narrative of an intractable conflict between science and religion. “Scientific ideas,” he writes, “have not just fostered secularity and religious decline but have also been used to help people believe in the existence of unseen, heavenly realms and recover an imaginative sense for the supernatural” (3).
